Does America Need Manufacturing? What Does Mr. Arithmetic Tell Us?

The NYT devoted a major Sunday magazine piece to this question. It never raised the most fundamental question, if we buy all our manufactured goods from someone else, how are we going to pay for them?

Our goods deficit is currently running at annual rate of around $800 billion or 5.3 percent of GDP. We have a surplus on services of around $170 billion a year, less than 1.2 percent of GDP. If we lost all our manufacturing, then the deficit on goods would increase by about $1.2 trillion to...